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Abstract
This paper explores and discusses those human mental processes and capabilities which pose a serious challenge to the actualization of the Technological Singularity scenario. It posits that the contemporary human mind-intellectFootnote1 and its further evolution is the main issue and not AI takeover. It elaborates some relatively less explored aspects of human mental architecture and functioning that defy emulation by AI. It introduces the concept of ‘integrated autonomous intellect’ as the future evolutionary stage of the human intellect. It opts for a positive vision of the harmonious collective future(s) of human mind-intellect and AI instead of the Technological Singularity scenario.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This composite term denotes ‘intellect’ as a part of human mind but since we will also be focusing on it separately so we decided to put an accent on it. The term ‘mind’ is being used because it is a composite of many processes, functions and capabilities other than the intellect.
2 It is interesting that Tegmark chose the name of the Greek mythological God to represent his general AI. According to the myth of Prometheus, he made men from earth and water and then imparted fire to them which symbolizes knowledge, courage, progress, etc. (Franssen, Citation2014). The highly advanced and complex capabilities that Tegmark’s (Citation2017) Prometheus displays and how its capability of redesigning itself at exponential speed gradually enables it to become the main intelligent force behind all political, economic and social happenings in human life reveals to us the unconscious anticipation and trepidation we have of AI superseding and controlling human life. Of course, in all fairness to Tegmark, the actual focus of his thinking and work is not this fictional future scenario but ‘human’ future alongside AI.
3 This term does not mean minus the individual mind. That is not possible because both our sensory and non-sensory perception and cognition take place within and though our individual mental process. But due to the evolution of the human intellect objective (from the standpoint of the object as it exists in itself, in terms of its own specifics) perception, cognition and reasoning have also become a part of the human capability repertoire. So one part of the human mind is capable of thinking from the standpoint of external objects and processes. There cannot be any claim of complete objectivity as that is not possible but it is a hybrid state wherein the component of objective thinking is more dominant. And subjective thinking is when the subjective individual standpoint and agenda are dominant.
4 To give an example. In 1963, while protesting against the oppressive regime in South Vietnam, a Vietnamese Buddhist Monk decided to burn himself to death. That is, he decided to replace his in-built genetic goal of survival and self-preservation with its opposite; annihilation by deliberate and conscious choice. The noteworthy part of this incident is that while he was burning, his mind, rigorously trained in mindfulness, was able to override his inherent reflexive/genetic pain process. He was consumed by the flames without his uttering a sound or moving any part of his body and in a meditative position (Koch, Citation2013).
5 We are referring here to the Achilles and Tortoise paradox.
6 Here we are referring to the efforts of prophets, philosophers, mystics to connect with the larger process of reality and to work for stability and harmony. In fact, some scientists have also been espousing various kinds of unified theories like Gaia hypothesis, and other such efforts to understand Nature as a macro process and to explore the implications and applications of that understanding. One of the purposes of such scientific efforts have been to reduce conflicts, contradictions, and to promote stability and harmony between human beings and Nature. So the attempt that we are discussing is not something unprecedented. We are just adding another factor in it, i.e. AI. We are talking of an intelligent and harmony based partnership between human beings, AI and Nature.
7 By this term we mean the macro aggregate dimension of Nature and its dynamic evolutionary logic which encompasses all space and time (past, present, and future) and all forms and processes with their respective micro logics of formation, functioning and evolution. This definition is essentially derived from an existing definition used in an unpublished body of work called ‘Evolutionary Mentology’ which can be found on the following link: https://www.evolutionarymentology.com/glossary
8 Here we acknowledge that the concept of intelligence as used in AI is coming from the discipline of Cybernetics wherein the Newtonian (mechanics) concept of ‘energy’ dealing with closed systems was replaced by the concept of ‘information’, which included ideas like storage, coding, etc., which could better explain the working of electronic circuits and even the replication of biological cells (McCorduck, Citation2004). Hence the mental or intelligence functions of perceiving the external environment, processing of perceptions and then responding with appropriate actions began to be viewed just as a process of information exchange and manipulation while the energy substrate of the mechanism or process which enabled this functioning was ignored and no longer remained an area of mainstream scientific inquiry. In our view, information as organized data which becomes usable and meaningful for communication cannot emerge or exist without some concrete energy process underlying it. The information representations or images produced by electronic circuits involve underlying electron and photon energy processes. So ‘information’ as a process and product cannot logically have an existence without the involvement of some energy process in its creation. It acquires a life of its own apart from that energy source is another matter, which has been and is still being explored.
9 See Endnote 7.
10 These ideas are derived from the unpublished work ‘Evolutionary Mentology’.
11 He introduced the concepts of ‘potential’ intellect and ‘active’ intellect existing in the soul. The former being the intellect’s potential of acquiring all thoughts or becoming all things and the latter its actual or active making of all thoughts and of all things (Davidson, Citation1992). According to Aristotle the main function of the intellect was “to abstract essences or common natures from the images received by the senses” (Hatfield, Citation1996, p. 8).
12 Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes took Aristotle’s concepts of ‘potential’ and ‘active’ intellect and integrated them into “larger cosmic schemes.” According to them the active intellect came before potential intellect in the “descending order of existence.” (Davidson, Citation1992, p. 4). Hence active intellect played the major role in their philosophical works.
13 Descartes rejected the Aristotelian concept of intellect and in his Meditations on First Philosophy suggested that “pure intellect is a faculty best exercised independently of sensory content” (Hatfield, Citation1996, pp. 14–15).
14 A possible missing word in the original quotation which we have added to make the sentence clearer.
15 ‘Consciousness’ to be more precise. Although we do not think this is direct measuring of mental activity. It is again zeroing in on the deeper level of the brain processes and suggesting the occurrence of a phenomenon which is responsible for giving rise to a certain mental activity.
16 This capability is about perceiving not just the specific ‘process’ of any micro phenomenon but to be able to comprehend the dynamically interconnected and interactive layers and dimensions of the ‘process’ of Nature existing as a non-linear vibrating composite of unity and diversity. This capability has emerged in human history from time to time, in some philosophers, scientists, mystics, prophets, poets, but so far ‘computational perception’ which is about perception of discrete and micro objects and processes based primarily on sensory data, has kept polluting and dominating the functioning and products of this integrated perception. ‘computational perception’ has so far utilized the bulk of human mental resources of feeling, thinking, and reasoning. It is time now for ‘process perception’ to evolve to a more mature level where it can enable that level of understanding of the human mental complex which is needed for facilitating the evolutionary process of the integrated autonomous intellect.
17 According to Marcus and Davis (Citation2019), reliable summarizing is too much to ask of deep learning. Through various examples they show that deep learning is good (but sometimes misreads and misconstrues) at pattern recognition and classification but there are many tasks which require much more than that, i.e., reasoning, language and analogy, none of which can be handled well by AI (p. 68).
18 If one scans the first AI generated textbook on Lithium-Ion Batteries (published by Springer Nature) which is a compilation of extractive summaries of peer-reviewed papers on this topic, one will find “garbled and incoherent sentences” which are of no use to human readers (Vincent, Citation2019). So extractive summaries just have coherent chunks which depend upon the coherency of the input texts.
19 But which is highly diverse and subjectively and objectively relevant.
20 One of the main characteristics of Deep learning is that it is greedy for data and with small amounts of data or handful of examples its performance is hardly robust and in fact quite poor. “… Its forte is working with millions or billions of data points, gradually landing on a set of neural network weights that will capture the relations between those examples” (Marcus & Davis, Citation2019, pp. 59–60). AlphaGo had to be trained on 30 billion games for it to achieve superhuman performance. This is far more than what one human can play in a lifetime (Marcus & Davis, Citation2019, p. 59). Given this, it would be a tall order for it to compose a highly complex piece of work with limited and purposefully selected raw data.
21 We do not find any ‘fixed’ and ‘completed’ dictionaries of any of the living human languages. They are revised and upgraded periodically with new additions.
22 Mental genes just contain a flexible capability code for the intellect so its functioning and application is not determined and operated through a programme (Tariq et al., Citation2010). Hence the functioning of the intellect is not really computable.
23 It is suggested that “Both conscious and unconscious information processing are integrated into human intelligence. Artificial general intelligence must be able to give a machine realization of such integrated intelligence.” (Maruyama, Citation2020, p. 247). At the design or theoretical level such distinctions have been proposed in different AI architectures. For instance, in NARS a demarcation is made between the subconscious and conscious levels in the representation of emotional information. The criteria being whether ‘desire and satisfaction values’ and ‘events using emotional concepts’ are available to the inference process of the system or not (Wang et al., Citation2018). The actual operation and observation of this distinction in an AI system or robot is yet to materialize.
24 The human mental protocol system is a complex mechanism and structure for data compression within the human mind. A ‘mental protocol’ is kind of pre-processed solution or command, in relation to input data (perceptual and cognitive) regarding some specific problem, created for the efficient and smooth functioning of the Will mechanism of our minds. So that the Will process does not have to perform more than one or two steps of processing (weighing of possible and optimum solutions against the problems) in order to respond to a particular stimulus or situation. This compression mechanism not only compresses the primary perceptual or cognitive data but also its functional value, which is determined in accordance with the emotional likes and dislikes library and intellectual preferences of an individual. This means that if the emotional or intellectual value of a perceived object or situation is already known then the mind does not have to determine it again, it just uses the specific protocol for it instead. We can also call this our habit system. And just as we have some physical habits which operate more through the brain processes we also have these mental habits which also develop this direct connection with our motor processes. These mental habits like the other mental processes cannot yet be measured and mapped in computational terms.
25 This is an aside. We wish this issue of the mind being autonomous of the brain was as simple as the unconstrained algorithms running on a computer. The computer cannot ‘constrain’ the programs because of its specific hardware constructed by the human brain and mind and which ‘allows’ all kinds of programs to run freely on it. Contrary to this, the complex mesh and relationship between the human brain and mind has been constructed by the evolutionary process of Nature and it follows a hierarchy of numerous constraints and freedoms starting from the basic level of genes and going up to the body, brain and mind. So here the issue of mental autonomy is of another nature and complexity and will need to be designed and engineered just like we designed both the computer and the programs that run on it.
26 We would like to clarify here that we are not suggesting that the energy substrate of the mind is a completely separate and disconnected process from the brain. In fact, it is integrally connected with the brain because it arises out of it. We are proposing that the building blocks of the mind which make up our various mental processes and functions are a hybrid process; of quantum processes generated in brain’s microtubules (ideas of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff) and some massless magnetic energy forms. Details can be read on the following link: https://www.evolutionarymentology.com/the-formation-and-functioning-of-me